Carl Bernstein is calling for a Senate Investigation of President Bush ...
...to learn what this president and his vice president knew and when they
knew it; to determine what the Bush administration has done under the
guise of national security; and to find out who did what, whether legal
or illegal, unconstitutional or merely under the wire, in ignorance or
incompetence or with good reason, while the administration barricaded
itself behind the most Draconian secrecy and disingenuous information
policies of the modern presidential era. ...
... The first fundamental question that needs to be answered by and about
the president, the vice president, and their political and
national-security aides, from Donald Rumsfeld to Condoleezza Rice, to
Karl Rove, to Michael Chertoff, to Colin Powell, to George Tenet, to
Paul Wolfowitz, to Andrew Card (and a dozen others), is whether lying,
disinformation, misinformation, and manipulation of information have
been a basic matter of policy—used to overwhelm dissent; to hide
troublesome truths and inconvenient data from the press, public, and
Congress; and to defend the president and his actions when he and they
have gone awry or utterly failed. ...
... But most grievous and momentous is the willingness—even enthusiasm,
confirmed by the so-called Downing Street Memo and the contemporaneous
notes of the chief foreign-policy adviser to British prime minister
Tony Blair—to invent almost any justification for going to war in Iraq
(including sending up an American U-2 plane painted with U.N. markings
to be deliberately shot down by Saddam Hussein's air force, a plan
hatched while the president, the vice president, and Blair insisted to
the world that war would be initiated "only as a last resort").
Attending the meeting between Bush and Blair where such duplicity was
discussed unabashedly ("intelligence and facts" would be jiggered as
necessary and "fixed around the policy," wrote the dutiful aide to the
prime minister) were Ms. Rice, then national-security adviser to the
president, and Andrew Card, the recently departed White House chief of
staff.
It's a long article, but well worth the time. It seems unlikely that Bush will be able to survive the next 2 1/2
years without suffering a major collapse in public confidence (more so
even than his current high-30s approval rate).
Fitzgerald is coming with more indictments. Iraq is falling apart.
War with Iran may bring more doubt than support from the American
public. Or what support there is may be fleeting. Gas prices are
soaring. Interest rates are on the way up. The Katrina rebuilding
effort is stalled, as is the 9/11 memorial in NYC.
Retired generals are stepping up and calling for the secretary of defense to resign. The vice president shot a man in the face. The
public is starting to perceive Bush as arrogant more so than honest.
Wages are stagnant. Healthcare costs are inflating, and Medicare
Part D seems to be a disaster (too expensive for the nation, and too
difficult for seniors to understand). The rich are getting richer.
And it looks like the housing bubble may collapse, leaving tens of
thousands of Americans burdened by crushing debt, and possibly leading
to cracks in the financial system.
Things really don't bode well for the next few years. It would take
a real genius to get the nation on a firm footing, and if there is
anything Bush is not, it's a genius. In fact, some say he may be the worst president in history.
I recently discovered Monster Munching, a wonderful Orange County food blog. The blog's author, who goes by the moniker elmomonster, has eaten at (and blogged!) scores of restaurants in the southern California region, and he has the photos of his meals to prove it. From a 99¢ breakfast at Ikea to an $87 dinner at Chat Noir, he writes accessibly and with descriptive flair about the food, service, and ambience.